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A review of APEX World 2017 - Day 2

After a short but good night sleep and an excellent breakfast, Mike Hichwa delivered his second keynote "RAD Challenge: Build a Real World application in 60 minutes”. Although he suffered from connection issues, Mike managed to wow the audience showing the new packaged app "Quick SQL” and the new (currently Cloud-only) “Blueprint” option to create a new application. As JSON is not code (but just a collection of value-attribute pairs), it was really a no-code showcase!

Then it was parallel session time again and I went to see how Christian Rokitta would "Bootstrapify Universal Theme”. The message is: You don’t have to unsubscribe from the Universal Theme (and please don’t!) to create an application that looks totally different from the “regular” APEX applications.

Then I had to deliver my second presentation “Docker for Dummies”. It was aimed at people who might have heard of Docker but really have hardly a clue what it is - and what the benefits are. I received really good feedback on this session and quite a lot of additional questions afterwards. So it seems I did made people curious and enthousiast about Docker. Mission completed!

During another excellent lunch, we could still enjoy the beautiful weather and the Rotterdam skyline. It was good to spend some time outside in the fresh air.

Then the last part of the event started. Dimitri kicked it off with “Moving my APEX app to the Exadata Express Cloud. Live!”. He explained the differences in (some of) the cloud offerings Oracle has and how you can move your application and data from your local instance into the Exadata Express Cloud. As Mike explained during his keynote on the first day, EECS will get better: more workspaces, really “Cloud first”, optional upgrading (after APEX 5.1), a local datacenter etc. Oh, yes, and a free subscription to the Oracle Developer Cloud Service as well!

The last regular session I attended was “Forms to APEX” by Sergei Martens. The APEX pages he showed were impressive. So different than anything else and enriched with numerous cool features. I especially liked the “Outlook style” interface because it is so close to what a user is used to, he/she can start using that application right away without any training whatsoever. The presentation could even be better if he had shown the original Forms screens as a reference ...

And finally, at the last keynote, Shakeeb could do his “The Center of the Universal Theme” presentation. Of course the presentation wasn’t just good looking - it had good content as well and I really like Shakeeb’s presentation style (as do a lot of other people I heard afterwards).

As a “goodbye” we were offered some drinks and snacks and then it was time to go home.

Next year APEX World 2018 it will probably be on the same wonderful location. I am already looking forward to it and i encourage everyone who is interested in APEX to attend!

Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.
That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user.The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even worse) while you…

Nowadays Docker is everywhere. It is one of the main components of Continuous Integration / Continuous Development environments. That alone indicates Docker has to be seen more as a Software Delivery Platform than as a replacement of a virtual machine.

However ...

If you are running an Oracle database using Docker on your local machine to develop some APEX application, you will probably not move that container is a whole to test and production environments. Because in that case you would not only deliver a new APEX application to the production environment - which is a good thing - but also overwrite the data in production with the data from your development environment. And that won't make your users very excited.
So in this set up you will be using Docker as a replacement of a Virtual Machine and not as a Delivery Platform.
And that's exactly the way Martin is using it as he described in this recent blog post. It is an ideal way to get up and running with an Oracle database …

If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one:
then you disable the "Escape special characters" property and the result is an updatable multirecord form.
That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03.
But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows.
So for processing y…